The birth of autobiographical literature in michel Foucault’s history on the will to know

Abstract

This article raises the possibility of finding an emergence of autobiographical literature in the work of Michel Foucault from the moment in which this philosopher ceases to be interested in literature as a self-referential space to enter into the history of criminals, madmen, abnormal people, minuscule and infamous lives, whose stories are compromised within different discursive practices promoted by mechanisms of power. In this sense, the diaries of Pierre Rivière, Herculine Barbine or Alexina B. and the anonymous Englishman in My secret life, will not only question the will to know about crime and sexuality that was beginning to emerge in medical, psychiatric and legal terms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but will also call into question literary institutionality on the basis of a kind of genealogy of autobiographical literature, born, in its generality, within confessional practices. In this way, Foucault demonstrates a prior interest in autobiography before this writing practice is situated within an ethics and aesthetics of the self.